Category: Monthly Review Press /

Inspiring resistance in County Mayo: Counterfire reviews “Shamrocks and Oil Slicks” and

Inspiring resistance in County Mayo: Counterfire reviews “Shamrocks and Oil Slicks” and

February 20, 2024

Fred Wilcox tells the story of peaceful resistance met by cruel violence, over a period of fifteen years, by a people whose love for their families and communities, the sea, their rivers, lakes and bogs, pitted them against Shell Oil -one of the world’s most destructive predators. Through their struggle, they have also shown us a way of resisting the powerful corporate/government interlock which threatens communities with destruction of the environment and their way of life....

New York City Monthly Review Office Closure

February 20, 2024

The Monthly Review office in New York City is presently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, we ask that you please email our office rather than call, if at all possible. Voice mail will be answered as we are able.

Clarity of ideas and political method: Resolute Reader looks at “The Robbery of Nature”

Clarity of ideas and political method: Resolute Reader looks at “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

Over the last few decades John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have been at the forefront of showing how classical Marxism is the foremost tool in explaining capitalism's rift with the ecological systems that support our society. They have shown how Karl Marx's idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ explains how capitalism is a break with other historical modes of production, a break that has transformed our relationship to the natural world and then broken the ongoing metabolism between humans and the planet. Reading this book while trapped at home during the Covid-19 pandemic it is very easy to see the practical application of Marx's metabolic rift theory....

Zillah Eisenstein offers up “A Manifesto of Sorts for COVID-19”

Zillah Eisenstein offers up “A Manifesto of Sorts for COVID-19”

February 20, 2024

COVID-19 like most disease is democratic—it can affect anyone, although with differing options to respond to it. The world, including the US, is not democratic. This does not bode well. But we can move forward because simple individualism contradicts the interdependency of this COVID crisis. ‘We’ all suffer when one person circulates with symptoms—and we will flourish if we accept responsibility to isolate/distance and protect one another....

Anti-Capitalist Hotbed: Counterpunch on Cal Winslow’s “Radical Seattle”

Anti-Capitalist Hotbed: Counterpunch on Cal Winslow’s “Radical Seattle”

February 20, 2024

Popular uprisings are rarely as spontaneous as the mainstream press often makes them out to be. Instead, from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring and beyond, they are more often the result of extended grassroots organizing, previous actions and strikes, and even legislative campaigns. The rates of participation are almost always linked to the amount of organizing that took place weeks, months and even years before the event takes place. ¶ It is this understanding that makes Cal Winslow’s recently published book Radical Seattle such an excellent history....

How capitalism interlocks with imperialism: Counterfire reviews Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

How capitalism interlocks with imperialism: Counterfire reviews Intan Suwandi’s “Value Chains”

February 20, 2024

Capitalism has always been international in nature. Even reaching back to its earliest embryonic form, in the concentrations of industry and merchant capital in Renaissance Italy, capital depended upon a European-wide trading market. The system’s true emergence came in the context of the European conquest of the Americas, its trading outposts in Asia, and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. An international hierarchy enabled by atrocity, war and plunder has always been central to the functioning of capitalism...

When Solidarity Mattered: CounterPunch considers “Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919”

When Solidarity Mattered: CounterPunch considers “Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919”

February 20, 2024

This is a special book, bearing an almost sacred topic for all those interested in the history of the American labor and the Left. The vibrant, pre-1920 Socialist Party, waxing strong and confident until struck down for its resistance to the US entry into the First World War, stood for a larger and more diverse radicalism. including Wobblies, quasi-wobblies. labor and cultural radicals of no certain description and of several generations. They had in common the sense that dramatic change in society was possible, perhaps inevitable....

Newsletter sign-up

Keep up to date with all the latest socialist news from MR